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The App Assessor – Improved Help

Salesforce’s AppExchange is an add-on buffet and can be overwhelming at times when it comes to searching for a specific functionality. Recently, it celebrated its 10th birthday, boasting over 3 million installs and 55,000 app reviews to date. If you have a need for something in Salesforce, chances are an app for it already exists or could very likely be on the way.

While the listing reviews are helpful and most apps have some form of trial option, chances are you’re still unsure if an app is right for you, at least at a high level.

But never fear… The App Assessor is here!

This handy new blog hero will dive deeper into an app, highlighting the different features, the overall org impact, its ease to setup, and cost. Building and evaluating your Salesforce AppExchange wish list will become a whole lot easier.

One of their Salesforce Apps, Improved Help does just that and gives an org the tools to inject knowledge content throughout an environment. Not only that, every time that the knowledge content is used, the interaction itself is captured so that it can be analysed! Team leaders can find where users are struggling, without even having to ask.Improved Apps was founded in 2011 and since then they have been helping Salesforce Customers across the globe to solve issues with adoption and proficiency with Salesforce.

o Learning curve to be able to administer and setup
Requires effort to maintain as per any knowledge base

Features

There’s a ton of features that stand out in the Improved Help package, giving you a full suite of options for improving change management and adoption rates.

To launch the Improved Help overlay, a user can click the “Help Me” button or a custom link to summon an army of help content (provided these have been setup).

From here a user can click any of the advanced help icons and an article will be shown on the page to provide further information and tips. Alternatively, they can use Improved Help’s Quick Access Menu on the right to navigate and explore help content further.

The content can be rated, bookmarked, commented on, or shared with a colleague, further fuelling the data when it comes to reporting.

The help text area also supports media content, so that users aren’t limited to just a wall of text when needing more information.

One of the exciting features of the App, is that at any time, a help topic can be explored further taking you to… *Drumroll sounds*

Your org’s own internal knowledge base! This offers even more features, such as the ability to explore complete guides of linked articles, view related resources, and experience the knowledge base journey even more so.

This internal knowledge base could be an alternative to companies wishing to use Salesforce Knowledge strictly for internal purposes. I’d fully recommend reviewing this particular function further against your business case for knowledge, as this could be something that’s a much better fit for purpose.

Another exciting feature already mentioned the analytics power provided from within the app.

Just by clicking the analytics button, a report prebuilds itself and can be fully customised with any extra information that is needed. This is powerful in discovering where users struggle the most with the system and require additional education.

Since the content is all native, there is also the ability to bring content to sandboxes with minimal effort (but to note, partial / full copy sandboxes are required to bring across records). There is also the migration toolkit which can allow the transitioning of content between separate orgs if that functionally is ever required.

In terms of being Lightning ready – the functionality exists and the components exist in the package, but still currently beta mode. No doubt this will be released fully in the upcoming months.

As you can see there is a ton of features within this app that have only been touched on. Impressive how much one app exchange package can contain and number of different components.

Impact

There are several different use cases for installing this Improved Help App, with the following being identified as the first.

If your business is undergoing a mass transition into the Salesforce platform, this app can greatly be used to support the change management process in multiple ways.

Poor user adoption is also a tough challenge for any organisation, so being able to monitor where users are requiring more help or are struggling is a significant benefit. Couple this with an internal knowledge base of content and you have some powerful weaponry at your disposal for the adoption war.

If your Salesforce org is heavily complicated, then this app is a great fit to determine exactly what a specific field change will trigger and guide users when interacting with the system.

Another possibility is to improve user training and the initial on boarding into your Salesforce environment. Again, this would be worthwhile if your org is setup with various flows and business processes that heavily deviate from the everyday Sales or Service cloud model, to avoid users getting overwhelmed by the environment.

Data inconsistency is also a big issue in some companies, so this tool can go above the standard inline editing note of “your text should be in the format of xx-xxx” to providing more interactive and thorough assistance.

Setup

Initial installation is very painless. There are a few guides and demos to point you in the right direction ant there’s also plenty of support from the Improved Apps team if you do encounter any difficulty. There are also additional training packages that can be purchased to provide hands-on training if need be.

Given the number of features in this app, there is a bit of upskilling required to know how all the different tools are utilised and the application is configured.

If time is an issue, Improved Apps also offer “Content Packs” which are a set or articles and pre-built help tips for various of the standard objects. The come in XML format and it’s easy to upload these into an org using uploading capabilities in the app. Alternatively “Jet-Pack” setup suites are also an option where Improved Apps can facilitate the setup and work with your team to tailor the content.

However, if you do wish to write the content yourself as with any new knowledge base a fair amount of man hours are required. The content would need to be maintained especially if your org is far from stable and is constantly having updates made. This could be a great chore for interns or graduates to take up and a great way to learn more about Salesforce!

In terms of granting access to specific functionality, there are various permission sets for the Improved Help features, so no need to worry about your article generating users having any form of god-rights.

Pricing

The pricing for this app is actually quite a steal given how many features have been noted above.

15 USD or 10 Pounds a month per user is incredibly cheap, even if you need to produce your own articles. You will need a license to access any of the articles, produce them, or use the report building functionality.

A quick tip if the financials are an issue is that these licenses aren’t fixed for a user and they can be passed around at any time. For companies wanting to dedicate a couple of licenses particularly to training new staff or adopting new business groups into Salesforce, this could be a cheap way to do so.

The content packs that have been pre-build are also available to purchase with various articles already created for the various standard objects (which are yours to keep forever). Cost efficiency for these varies depending on the size of your org, so if your user base is quite large then these are worth exploring.

There’s also support for non-profits, so reach out to Improved Apps for more information on this if you fall into this category.

Conclusion

Having a more advanced help text is just the core of what this app offers, there”s so much more!

Wrapping things up, for more information feel free to review their AppExchange listing or reach out to the Improved Apps team and consider installing a trial if this ticks all the boxes so far.

Below is a short video on Improved Help and feel free to get in touch with the team for trial options.

The first App Assessor review ends with a big thanks to Improved Apps for the support throughout the review.

Interested in having your app reviewed by the App Assessor?
Send an email to [email protected] for further information and pricing!